Booting with the vnc option I get the error
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/anaconda", line 1013, in <module>
runVNC()
File "/usr/bin/anaconda", line 343, in runVNC
vncS.startServer()
File "/usr/lib/anaconda/vnc.py", line 217, in startServer
self.initialize()
File "/usr/lib/anaconda/vnc.py", line 128, in initialize
if self.ip.find(':') != -1:
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'
Switching to the second terminal shows that the network is configure and manually starting anaconda again starts the vnc server with no errors.

Can you attach all the log files for this problem? Seems rather transient, nobody else has reported something like this.
We are reviewing some code to handle the case where we don't have a known IP yet, so the traceback at least would go away, you just wouldn't be told what the IP is to connect to.

I'm seeing this with F18 (on Intel hardware) too. I have a USB Ethernet dongle. It works fine, but perhaps it's a little too slow? When booting with 'vnc' on the command line, I end up at a screen saying
anaconda 18.37.4 for Fedora 18 (pre-release) started.
07:04:26 Starting VNC...
07:04:26 Could not initialize the VNC server: No IP addresses found.
At the bottom it says 'Pane is dead', with a green bar below it listing what's on the various ttys.
The suggestion in comment 2 — that you just wouldn't be told which IP address to connect to, but that it would still work rather than crashing — would seem to be a very sensible one. Simply refusing to go any further, as it does at the moment (and now *deliberately* so, it seems, rather than just a traceback), is definitely wrong.

Looking at the logs, I see the network comes up at 07:04:28. Just a little too late for anaconda. But that's not relevant; this is clearly an anaconda issue and it should bring up the server even if it doesn't have an IP address *yet*. Hell, even *waiting* for an IP address would be better than just crashing.

Discussed at 2013-01-02 blocker review meeting. Tentatively accepted as a blocker per criterion "The installer must be able to complete an installation using all supported interfaces", in some cases (we think related to slow DHCP, but that's really just an inference we're drawing). We believe it may be possible to workaround this simply by pulling in any updates.img or kickstart (even one which does nothing) as this will cause the network to be brought up during dracut phase: if reporters could test that, it would be helpful.
Note also that https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=868777 looks very similar, but was claimed fixed in 18.37.2. David Woodhouse's is the only report since then: do you have any more details on your configuration or logs, David?

I've added a more coherent diagnosis in bug 868777, which is indeed very similar. Basically, the bug wasn't fixed at all. The suggestion in comment 2 of this bug wasn't implemented, and all we did was juggle the parameters of the existing race condition while retaining the same fundamental brokenness.
It *isn't* slow DHCP. It's an Ethernet device which is slow to show up at all (using USB dongle because as usual, the shiny new e1000 that's on this board doesn't work even with the F18 kernel). The existing "fix" doesn't do anything in that situation at all.

Re using updates.img... I did pass 'inst.repo=nfs:...' to the kernel; shouldn't it be looking in an RHupdates/ directory in the install tree I pointed it at? It doesn't even seem to have attempted to mount it at this point — obviously. Is that another bug?

Created attachment 671691[details]
Untested patch
Something like this might work. Completely untested.
It looks like we already cope with there being no hostname/ip to connect to, and we do just print a relatively unhelpful "please connect your VNC client". It's just that we take an exception *before* that. This should avoid the exception, and lets us continue without aborting.

Package anaconda-18.37.10-1.fc18:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 18 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing anaconda-18.37.10-1.fc18'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-0291/anaconda-18.37.10-1.fc18
then log in and leave karma (feedback).